The bird is cold

Yahoo launched a private version of what they are calling FireEagle – a service that allows you to track your location to be shared with applications that build to the FireEagle API – its basically a location “broker” (for self reported location).  I’m a big fan of location based services (we’re investors of IP geo-information company Quova and geo-spatial platform company deCarta), so the idea of a common platform upon which to build location aware applications.  Through Quova, we’re small investors in Navizon who has a similar dev platform to FireEagle.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I clicked over to the “application gallery” tab only to find nothing there.  Nothing.  Not a single “this is cool stuff, we’ve thrown a few things up to get you going” application.  Where is the Facebook “I’m here; my friends are there” integration?  Or better yet, the Twitter “friend location tracker”?  Or even a simple widget for my blog that reports my current location Nadda.  Just a note that says essentially “there’s no there there yet”.  I don’t get the point of launching a service – even just to the developer community, which is clearly their intent from the email I received – without at least a few demo apps.  I have to imagine that there are scores of companies out there with the time, talent and inclination to have done the work to be included with this launch.  Hopefully Yahoo/FireEagle will quickly get its act together and have a full application library before they take this service much further.

I have a few more invite codes if you’re looking to check it out.  Send me a note directly and if they are not all taken, I’ll hook you up.

I’m excited about what Yahoo is doing – just want to see more meat on the bones of the bird. . .

Update: My invite codes have all been given out.